Are Biden's Opponents Being Too Coy In Making Age An Issue?

[Gothmog]

15. These so-called gaffes have nothing to do with age

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I would challenge anyone to try to explain how the number of gaffes a candidate utters actually tells us something meaningful about his or her prospective presidency. The argument that some number of gaffes suggests cognitive problems that could affect Biden’s performance doesn’t hold water. There are legitimate questions about whether someone Biden’s age — he’ll be 78 at the start of the next presidential term — can handle the rigors of the presidency. But Biden made these kinds of embarrassing statements in his 60s and his 50s, and even his 40s. It’s not a product of age; it’s just who he is.

Besides, we make demands of politicians that no ordinary person would be able to satisfy. I can promise you that if I hired a team of people to follow you around for a week (let alone a year) recording every word that came out of your mouth, there would be some things you’d want to take back.

When a theme like “Joe Biden, gaffe machine” gets locked in, it becomes a frame through which the media view the events of the campaign, leading to profoundly different standards by which each candidate is judged. In its most twisted form, you get something like the 2000 election, in which reporters decided that Al Gore was a liar and George W. Bush was dumb, the consequence of which was that Bush could lie without reporters taking any particular notice even as they pored over every word that left Gore’s mouth to see if under some interpretation it strayed from perfect factual accuracy.

As a similar kind of frame takes hold in this election, other candidates will be allowed to say something unintentionally offensive, garble a URL or otherwise misspeak, with only mild punishment. But when Biden does it, the alarms will go off, and the keyboards will begin clacking.

The cynical expectation is that whether it’s right or not, the gaffe coverage will probably continue: Biden will keep saying cringe-worthy things, and the news media will continue to treat them as newsworthy. And much of Biden’s appeal to Democratic voters is about “electability,” its own bit of campaign pathology that no one should waste time on.